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CHAPTER 2
The Limited Importance of Gun Control
from a Criminological Perspective
don b. kates
An Erroneous Mantra
Carefully tailored gun controls can marginally reduce gun violence
rates. But criminological research does not support claims that gun availability to ordinary people promotes violence. The oft-heard mantra
“more guns equal more death, fewer guns equal less” cannot be squared
with U.S. experience since 1946 (the earliest time for which reliable
‹gures on murder and gunstock rates exist). That year those rates were
34,430 guns and 6 murders per 100,000 population. As of 2000 the gunstock rate had swelled to 95,500 but the murder rate was only 6.1 per
100,000.1 Though murder rates varied greatly over the intervening
years, those variations bear no apparent relation to the vast increase in
guns.
The per capita accumulated stock of guns (the total of ‹rearms
manufactured or imported into the United States, less imports) has
increased in recent decades, yet there has been no correspondingly
consistent increase in either total or gun violence. . . . About half of
the time gun stock increases have been accompanied by violence
decreases, and about half the time [they have been] accompanied by
violence increases, just what one would expect if gun levels had no net
impact on violence rates.2
The total gunstock quintupled from almost 48.5 million in 1946 to
almost 260 million in 2000.3 Yet, the murder rates for 1946 and 2000
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were almost identical. This noncorrelation helps support the general
criminological conclusion that violence rates re›ect basic sociocultural
and economic factors, not the mere availability of any particular form of
weapon.
A half-century of evaluations of gun controls has yielded four largely
negative ‹ndings: (1) gun availability does not cause ordinary law-abiding adults to kill, though guns facilitate violence by criminals; (2) victim
gun ownership deters crime and allows self-defense; (3) though reasonable, gun bans to criminals and the irresponsible are very dif‹cult to
enforce; and (4) without guns, people intent on crime or suicide make do
with other means.4 Indeed, a 2003 study by the vehemently anti-gun
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that no gun control had so far been shown to reduce violence.5
Basic U.S. Gun Statistics
By 2003 the United States had about 272 million civilian-owned
‹rearms, with handguns estimated at almost 100 million. If new gun sales
continue to increase at the 4–5 million per year rate of the last few
decades, by 2005 the civilian gunstock will exceed 280 million, roughly
105 million being handguns.6
These ‹gures re›ect raw production and import-export data but take
no account of factors that both increase and decrease gunstock by
unknown amounts. Unknown numbers of guns were destroyed over the
years by poor maintenance or after police con‹scation. Conversely,
unknown numbers of guns were added to the total gunstock through
unrecorded imports (e.g., war souvenirs) or sale to civilians of old police
and military weapons.
Gun ownership can be estimated from survey data, but these are even
less reliable than production data, for large numbers of owners won’t
admit they own guns.7 Nevertheless 40–45 percent of households admit
they have guns, with an average of four owned per household. About 25
percent admit having handguns.8
Every category of gun death sharply declined during the 1990s. Gun
murder declined from 17,746 in 1991 to 10,801 in 2000 (down from 7
deaths per 100,000 population to 3.9); gun suicide from 18,526 to 16,586;
and fatal gun accidents from 1,441 to 776.9
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The murder decline may be partly attributable to criminal attacks
being deterred by increased victim access to guns (see later discussion).
But gun suicide and fatal accidents also declined. This obviously cannot
be attributable to increases in defensive gun ownership. What is clear is
that the 1990s data do not support the “more guns equal more death”
mantra. During that decade, the addition of 47 million new guns (and the
enhanced availability of guns due to the issuance of 3.5 million concealed
carry licenses) coincided with a more than 25 percent decline in overall
gun death.
International Comparisons
Murder rates are much lower in Europe. Comparisons of the United
States to a few low gun ownership European nations are routinely
advanced as supporting the mantra. But when broad, nonselective comparisons are made, nations with more guns do not seem to have more
murder. Norway has Western Europe’s highest gun ownership (32 percent of households) yet its lowest murder rate. Norway’s cross-Baltic
neighbor Holland has the lowest European gun ownership (1.9 percent)
but a 50 percent higher murder rate. Completing the pattern of noncorrelation, Sweden, with gun ownership midway between Norway and
Holland (15.1), has a higher murder rate than Holland and a much higher
rate than gun-laden Norway. In turn, Sweden’s murder rate is lower
than its cross-Baltic neighbor Germany, although Sweden has twice the
gun ownership. Spain, with twelve times more ownership than Poland,
has a 50 percent lower murder rate. Finland, with fourteen times more
gun ownership than neighbor Estonia, still has the lower murder rate.
(The bases for these comparisons—and countless similar ones—are the
data set out in tables 2 and 3.)
The mantra is often supported by claims that the United States has the
developed world’s highest gun ownership (true) and its highest murder
rates (false). This mistake came from the USSR’s embarrassed
falsi‹cation of Russian murder rates. Recent revelation of thirty-‹ve
years of accurate Russian rates shows they consistently exceeded those
of America, despite Russia’s decades of banning handguns and severely
restricting other guns—with enforcement so drastic that few Russian
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civilians have guns and murders rarely involve them. As of 1998–2001
murders per capita in the former Soviet Europe (Lithuania, Latvia,
Ukraine, etc.) are two to three times higher than in the United States,
while in Russia they are four times higher.10
Broadscale comparisons among developed nations do not show those
with higher gun ownership rates having distinctively higher murder
rates. Using “homicide and suicide mortality data for thirty-six nations
(including the United States) for the period 1990–1995,” compared to
gun ownership rates, there was “no signi‹cant (at the 5 percent level)
association between gun ownership and the total homicide rate.” In a
later study of twenty-one nations, “no signi‹cant correlations [of guns]
with total suicide or homicide rates were found.” This is also true internally: high gun ownership regions in Switzerland, Canada, England, and
the United States do not have higher murder rates than low ownership
areas.11
Advancing a Red Herring
In lieu of evidence that more guns equal more murder, the mantra’s supporters assert that “More Firearms = More Firearms Violence.”12 Even
this is not consistently true (see table 3). More important, it is irrelevant.
The point of gun bans is to reduce death. Proving it works requires
showing fewer deaths overall, not just that gun deaths fell while other
kinds of violent deaths rose with no net difference.
Murderers seem able to ‹nd guns even in nations where gun ownership is low. Or they kill just as well with other weapons. As for suicide,
in nations where guns are less available, comparable or greater numbers
of suicides occur by other means.13 Many European nations celebrated
for banning guns have double or more the U.S. suicide rate. Gunless
Russia’s suicide rate is four times higher than that of the United States,
just as is its murder rate. The thirty-six- and twenty-one-nation comparative studies show that lesser gun availability does not mean less murder
or suicide. At most it means only fewer such deaths with guns. The consistent noncorrelation to gun ownership shows once again that high
murder or suicide rates are attributable to basic sociocultural and economic factors, not mere availability of some particular weapon.
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Failure of Foreign Gun Laws
Though it is often assumed that Western Europe’s low murder rates
stem from strict gun control, this is not true. The rates were far lower yet
before World War II, when Europe had virtually no gun laws. Stringent
laws appeared in the turbulent post–World War I era—aimed not
against ordinary crime but against political violence. They failed to stem
either. From World War I on, violent crime has plagued all Western
nations regardless of their gun policies.14 The following summary comes
from a recent history of guns, gun laws, and violence in the United Kingdom.
When it had no ‹rearms restrictions England had little violent
crime, while the present extraordinarily stringent gun controls
have not stopped the increase in violence or even the increase in
armed violence. . . . Armed crime, never a problem in England, has
now become one. Handguns are banned but the kingdom has millions of illegal ‹rearms. Criminals have no trouble ‹nding them
and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957
the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold [and it has
continued to increase ever since].15
In the 1990s England, Scotland, Australia, and Canada topped
decades of increasingly stringent controls by outlawing many popular
types of ‹rearms and con‹scating them from hundreds of thousands of
owners law abiding enough to surrender them. Far from violence abating, it so intensi‹ed that by 2000 Australia, Canada, England, and Scotland ranked as four of the ‹ve industrialized nations highest in violence.
Despite much lower gun ownership, their violence rates were 100 percent or more above those of the United States and two other high gun
ownership nations, Belgium and Spain.16
Zimring and Hawkins still espouse the mantra stressing that English
murder rates remain far below ours.17 More important, however, is that
English murder rates started out far lower still—both absolutely and as
compared to the United States—when England had no gun controls.
The large increase of English murder over decades of ever more controls
emphasizes the role of socioeconomic and cultural factors and the unimportance of the availability of any particular type of weaponry.
Australia is also experiencing severely increasing violence. Noting
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that murder had declined, its prime minister attributed that to a vast
reduction in gun ownership. But the murder decline began more than
‹fteen years before the gun bans and did not accelerate with the massive
con‹scations of guns. Indeed, 2002 saw a reversal: an unprecedented
increase in murder, with other deadly weapons being used rather than
guns.18
Guns or No Guns, Ordinary People Do Not Murder
The “more guns equal more death” mantra appears plausible if one
thinks murders are mostly committed by ordinary people where a gun
was available in a moment of rage. But that is untrue of most murders, or
many murders, or virtually any murders.19 Homicide studies uniformly
show that “virtually all individuals who become involved in life-threatening violent crime have prior involvement in many types of minor (and
not so minor) offenses.”20 Far from being ordinary, they are extreme
social deviants with life histories of crime, violence, substance abuse,
and/or psychopathology. So consistently do homicide studies ‹nd this
to be the case that these things “have now become criminological
axioms” of the “basic characteristics of homicide”—for the great majority of murderers and most victims too.21
While only 15 percent of Americans have criminal records, about 90
percent of adult murderers have adult criminal records, averaging four
major felonies over a six-year adult period. That is also largely true of
juvenile killers (and victims) insofar as juvenile criminal records are
available. Studies of juvenile killers also ‹nd that 80–100 percent are psychotic or have psychotic symptoms.22
Amazingly, the only fact ever cited to support the “ordinary people
murder” mythology is that many murders occur in homes or involve
acquaintances—as if violent deviants don’t have ‹ghts or acquaintances
or homes. National data on gun murders occurring among acquaintances and in homes show that “the most common victim-offender relationship” is “where both parties knew one another because of prior illegal transactions.”23 There are also many “family murders,” but these
are not ordinary families, nor are the killers ordinary, decent people:
“[t]he day-to-day reality is that most family murders are preceded by a
long history of assaults” by the killer upon his mate and/or children.24
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For instance, of Massachusetts domestic murders in 1991–95, 75 percent
of perpetrators had a prior criminal history and 23.6 percent were under
an active restraining order at the time of the homicide. Forty percent of
perpetrators had a history of having been under a restraining order at
some time prior to the homicide, taken out either by the victim or some
other person.25
In short, if laws could disarm potential murderers, current federal and
state laws—which generally ban guns to juveniles, drug addicts, mental
incompetents, and persons convicted of a felony or of a domestic misdemeanor—should suf‹ce.26
Self-Defense with Guns
Not only is it pointless to disarm ordinary people (because they do not
kill), it is counterproductive, both individually and socially, in minimizing the crime-reductive potential of self-defense. Contrast U.S. massacres in situations where only the killers were armed to Israel, where
terrorists are often shot by intended victims because Israeli policy
encourages civilians to carry guns so there will be armed defenders in all
public places. Indeed, recent enactment of laws in some American states
allowing quali‹ed applicants to carry concealed handguns has resulted in
U.S. incidents of massacres being ended by armed victims.27
Opponents of gun ownership declare self-defense both immoral
(“lethal violence in self-defense only engenders more lethal violence”)28 and ineffective, asserting that guns can rarely be used in selfdefense and that people who defend themselves in any way are much
more likely to suffer severe injury; for victims of rape or robbery, “the
best defense against injury is to put up no defense—give them what they
want or run.”29
However, all available data show that victims who defend with a gun
are less likely to be injured than those who submit—and, of course, are
far less likely to be robbed or raped.30 In the great majority of gun
defense cases, the victim’s gun is not even ‹red; 80 percent or more of
attackers ›ee when a victim just displays a gun.
How often are guns used in self-defense? Based on nineteen different
population surveys, the criminologist
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Gary Kleck found that Americans defend themselves with guns 2.5
million times per year by warding off threats to their persons and
property. Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig put the number of defensive
gun uses at 1.3 million per year. Hemenway and Azrael’s national
survey, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, found 1.5
million defensive gun uses per year. All these surveys reveal a great
deal of self-defensive gun use of ‹rearms; in fact, more defensive
gun uses than crimes committed with ‹rearms.31
Kleck’s ‹ndings were ruefully but praisingly hailed by the dean of
American criminologists, Marvin Wolfgang, despite his vehement personal feelings (“I hate guns”).32 Concomitantly, Hemenway and Azrael
and Cook and Ludwig deeply oppose defensive gun ownership and
rejected Kleck’s survey evidence as wrong—until their own survey
results con‹rmed his. At that point they switched over to denying that
surveys provide a reliable method for enumerating gun defense events.33
They think survey respondents may be falsely claiming to have used
guns for self-defense because that validates their decision to own a gun.
Even as Hemenway and colleagues accept this possibility, they blithely
reject the possibility that as many or more survey respondents falsely
denied defensive gun use for fear of attracting police attention to an
unreported gun incident. And even as Hemenway and colleagues reject
the great majority of responses claiming gun self-defense, they accept as
true the reports of respondents who say they were injured while resisting
with a gun. Hemenway and colleagues hail this as proof of how foolish it
is to resist rapists, robbers, and so forth, instead of “giv[ing them] what
they want.”34
To justify rejecting their own survey results showing vast numbers of
gun defense uses, Cook and Ludwig emphasize that, taken at face value,
those results would imply that 322,000 armed women routed rapists that
year. This Cook and Ludwig ridicule because a different survey suggests
there were only 316,000 rapes that year. But that other survey has been
shown to underestimate the incidence of rape by as much as thirty-three
times because so many victims will not disclose they were raped.35 Conservatively assuming the second survey is off by a factor of only twenty,
the actual number of rapes that year was over 6 million. So it is not at all
implausible that another 322,000 attempted rapes were repelled when
victims pulled guns.
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Critics of defensive gun use ignore a point of surpassing import. A
gun is the only mechanism that gives a weaker victim parity with an
attacker (even if the attacker also has a gun). The next best alternative, a
chemical spray, is ineffective against precisely those who are most likely
to engage in violent attacks: people who are under the in›uence of drugs
or alcohol or who are extremely angry.36
Widespread Legal Gun Carrying as a Deterrent to Violence
Carry concealed weapon (CCW) laws are based on the theory that violent
crime is deterred if criminals fear that any given potential victim may be
armed. The laws, which had been adopted in thirty-‹ve states as of 2003,
require that all law-abiding, responsible, trained adult applicants be issued
a CCW license. National Institute of Justice surveys among prison inmates
‹nd that large percentages report that their fear that a victim might be
armed deterred them from confrontation crimes. “[T]he felons most
frightened ‘about confronting an armed victim’ were those from states
with the greatest relative number of privately owned ‹rearms.” Conversely, robbery is highest in states that most restrict gun ownership.37
While it is clear that fear of armed victims does deter violence, the
question remains of how important this deterrent is. Based on twenty‹ve years of data from all U.S. counties, the economist John Lott found
that thousands of murders and other violent crimes did not occur in states
that adopted such CCW laws. Anti-gun lobbying groups responded by
falsely claiming that Lott’s work had been ‹nanced by the gun lobby.38
An ad hoc group of academics opposed to Lott’s work took the unusual
step of contradicting it in letters to the editor sent to every newspaper in
America that had reported the ‹nding.
One criticism was that the drops in violence were just too large to be
attributed to the CCW laws, given that less than 5 percent of the populace actually obtained permits. This, however, is a non sequitur. The
deterrent effect results not from victims actually shooting criminals but
from criminals knowing that anyone they attack may be carrying a gun.
The following are other criticisms of Lott’s results.39
• The results are attributable to ordinary cyclical changes in the
crime rate. To this Lott responds that his studies account for and
exclude cyclical variation.
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• As a technical matter, Lott has not accounted for variations between
the time when certain CCW laws were enacted and when they were
administratively implemented.
• While fear of armed victims caused violent crimes like robbery to
drop, nonconfrontation crimes like burglary of unoccupied
premises rose. Lott actually cites these facts as proving criminals are
deterred from violent crime into nonviolent ones.
• Lott’s focus on the entire twenty-‹ve-year period rather than on the
time periods in which various CCW laws went into effect magni‹es
the effect that only murder and robbery declined, but not aggravated assault and rape.
• Lott’s ‹ndings cannot be trusted because the amount of crime
decrease varied substantially between the different states that
adopted the CCW laws.
Lott has replied to these and many other criticisms,40 including a
number of technical statistical objections raised by scholars not necessarily opposed to his ‹ndings on political grounds. Several such scholars
have now replicated Lott’s work using added or different data, additional control variables, or new or different statistical techniques they
deem superior to those Lott used. Interestingly, the replications all
con‹rm Lott’s general conclusions; some even ‹nd that Lott underestimated the crime-reductive effects of allowing good citizens to carry concealed guns.41 For what it is worth, Lott’s book The Bias against Guns,
which reiterates, extends, and defends his ‹ndings, is endorsed by three
Nobel laureates.42
The Public Health Literature against Firearms
So far I have addressed criminological ‹ndings. Another entire literature
on ‹rearms emanates from the public health ‹eld. The following discussion derives from an extensive study of this literature I coauthored with
a University of North Carolina biostatistician and three professors at
Harvard and Columbia Medical Schools.43 In 1979 the public health
community adopted a goal to greatly reduce ‹rearms ownership, a
resolve it has formally and informally reiterated on many occasions.44
This preexisting political goal closes medical and public health journals
to ignore any other perspective. Public health journals and authors
acknowledge—indeed proclaim!—that their purpose in discussing
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‹rearms is to “speak out for gun control.” In the entire literature, consisting now of hundreds of public health publications, no more than ‹ve
even question (much less reject) this perspective.45
This dedication to a predetermined political goal has a predictably
adverse effect on the reliability and scholarship of this literature. Thus, a
2003 public health monograph asks, “Does a gun in the home increase
the likelihood of being shot and killed, or does it confer protection
against violent criminals?” Its purported answer consists of reciting the
number of gun deaths (more than half of them suicides, incidentally) to
prove the danger, while dismissing the protective value of guns without
noting even one statistic or study to the contrary.46 The monograph also
asserts “the consistency” of all research with the “more guns equal more
death” mantra. This consistency it manufactures by just not mentioning
all the contrary research.47
Authors who are among the most proli‹c and in›uential in the public
health literature assert that “limiting access to ‹rearms could prevent
many suicides.” As if it supported that assertion, they cite a diametrically
contrary research ‹nding that if guns are unavailable people just commit
suicide in other ways. The same authors also claim that “restricting
access to handguns could substantially reduce our annual rate of homicide”—citing as support a Department of Justice–sponsored evaluation
of ‹rearms regulation that actually concluded that “[t]here is no persuasive evidence that supports this view.”48
One of these authors, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, has written highly publicized “studies” but refused to disclose his underlying data to scholars
wanting to check it; nor do the public health journals publishing him
require him to do so.49
Probably the most widely referenced study in the public health literature compares Vancouver, Canada, to Seattle, claiming that (a) the latter
had a distinctively higher rate of gun ownership, so (b) it had a distinctively higher murder rate. One problem is that (a) is false. The two cities’
gun ownership rates are almost identical according to a survey apparently unknown to the authors, who also published an article blaming
Seattle’s supposedly higher gun ownership for its higher rate of suicide
by young men. Far more important, however, is that comparison of two
medium-sized cities is a wholly inadequate basis for concluding that
higher gun ownership causes higher murder or suicide rates. It bears
emphasis that the authors, and the New England Journal of Medicine,
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which published their article, were aware of research reaching opposite
conclusions from a broad comparison of American states to Canadian
provinces. The journal declined either to publish this research or to
require the authors to refer to it and explain how their own results were
valid despite their contradiction by a far larger, more meaningful data
set.50
Indicative of the standards of the anti-gun public health literature is its
repeated description of these Vancouver-Seattle comparison articles as
“elegant.”51 In contrast, a Canadian social scientist cited them as exemplifying “studies [that] are an abuse of scholarship, inventing, selecting,
or misinterpreting data in order to validate a priori conclusions.”52
These faults characterize the entire public health literature. As a general rule it simply never mentions the vast corpus of criminological
research that refutes or undercuts the “more guns equal more death”
mantra.53 Dubious or ›atly false assertions made in editorials or by lobby
groups are cited as if they were facts established by research.54 (Failure to
disclose when “facts” come from the anti-gun lobby is ironic since gun
lobby criticism of inaccuracy in public health articles is shrugged off with
“what do you expect from the gun lobby” responses.)55
Concluding eighty-some pages of such examples, my coauthors and I
dismissed the entire anti-gun public health literature as “so biased and
contain[ing] so many errors of fact, logic and procedure that it has no
claim to contributing to a scholarly or scienti‹c literature.” We ended by
quoting the sociologist James Wright’s remarks on the public health literature’s evocation of the simplistic “more guns equal more death”
mantra in preference to addressing basic social, economic, and/or cultural factors that actually underlie murder and suicide. He begins by
admitting that
there is a sense in which violence is a public health problem. So let
me illustrate the limitations of this line of reasoning with a public
health analogy. After research disclosed that mosquitoes were the
vector for transmission of yellow fever, the disease was not controlled by sending men in white coats to the swamps to remove the
mouth parts from all the insects they could ‹nd. The only sensible,
ef‹cient way to stop the biting was to attack the environment
where the mosquitoes bred. Guns are the mouth parts of the violence epidemic. The contemporary urban environment breeds violence no less than swamps breed mosquitoes. Attempting to control
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the problem of violence by trying to disarm the perpetrators is as
hopeless as trying to contain yellow fever through mandible control.56
Viability of Gun Laws
Disarming criminals, much less the general population, presents much
more dif‹cult problems than even enforcing narcotics laws. If narcotics
are, as many think, harmful per se, reducing people’s access to them even
slightly is a bene‹t (though the costs to the criminal justice system may
be inordinate). In contrast, since the great majority of gun owners never
commit violence, disarming them would expend vast enforcement
resources to no bene‹t. Laws designed to disarm criminals and the insane
are obviously appropriate. But as will be seen, those whom it is most
urgent to disarm are also the hardest to disarm.
The Futility of Supply-Side Measures
It is delusive, and a waste of resources, to hope that further regulation of
the ‹rearms industry can disarm violent felons. Probably less than
200,000 different guns are used in violent crimes annually, whereas just
the number of guns stolen annually is upward of 750,000. Furthermore,
federally sponsored prison surveys show most felons obtain guns not
from theft or gun stores but from friends or on the black market (which
doubtless recycles many stolen guns).57
Thus, criminals can obtain all the guns they need without ever visiting
a gun store. Moreover the most important difference between gun and
narcotics bans is that guns are not consumed by use. With proper care
the life expectancy of a gun is virtually in‹nite.58 So, even if felons could
be deprived of all ways to get new guns, they need only keep the guns
they already have.
Assuming supply-side controls ever produced a gun shortage among
criminals, the result would just be to produce a market for organized
crime to ‹ll by importing guns or covertly manufacturing them.59 Pot
metal copies of modern handguns would actually sell for less than guns
do now because they are much cheaper to produce and the black market
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is not burdened by taxes, record keeping, and safety standards.60 Illustrative of the futility of supply-side control is the discovery by English
police of a covert shipment of Croatian Mini-Uzi pistols without serial
numbers. Some English drug gang or organized gun traf‹cker had the
resources and connections in distant Croatia to either special-order
thirty Mini-Uzis without serial numbers or have them stolen from the
factory before serial numbers were stamped on them.61
In 1994 the head of Scotland Yard endorsed even more stringent gun
laws lest England become like the United States, which foreign anti-gun
advocates have long felt has such a gunstock as to make control efforts
futile.62 England responded to such sentiments by banning handguns,
con‹scating over 166,000 from owners law abiding enough to surrender
them. But by the period 2000–2003 England’s violence rate was among
the highest in the developed world—twice the American rate63—and
police were lamenting that though “Britain has some of the strictest gun
laws in the world [i]t appears that anyone who wishes to obtain a ‹rearm
[illegally] will have little dif‹culty in doing so.”64
In sum, there is scant reason to invest hope or resources in trying to
reduce the overall supply of guns, especially by controls over the
‹rearms industry.
The Failure of Demand-Side Strategy
A better alternative, at least theoretically, is demand-side control, that is,
stiff penalties to frighten criminals into eschewing gun possession or
misuse. But such laws are effectively nulli‹ed by the lack of the resources
needed to make the threat credible. Twenty-‹ve years ago, the premier
study of gun law enforcement concluded the following:
It is very possible that if gun laws do potentially reduce gun-related
crime, the present laws are all that is needed if they are enforced.
What good would stronger laws do when the courts have demonstrated that they will not enforce them?65
The last sentence oversimpli‹es the issues, lending spurious credibility to the gun lobby’s “gun control” program (endorsed also by the other
side) of laws supposedly mandating long prison terms for criminals misusing guns. Doubtless gun crime would be impacted if felons knew that
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severe sentences would be imposed on anyone possessing or carrying
guns (or on anyone committing a robbery or other violent crime with a
gun). But mandatory imprisonment laws are shams enacted to make
politicians look good without the funding needed to ever implement
them.
Prisons are already over›owing with felons who are far more dangerous than run-of-the-mill gun robbers, for example, rapists or robbers
who have maimed victims. So what mandatory imprisonment laws irresponsibly enacted without funding would mean (if the criminal justice
system took them seriously) is early release or lesser sentences for the
most dangerous criminals in order to give longer sentences to felons
who, at most, just pointed a gun at someone and took his money. Faced
with this reality, prosecutors and judges ‹nd ways around supposedly
mandatory sentencing for gun felons. Gun felons quickly discover they
will not be severely punished for mere possession; even for gun robbery
the penalty is often little more than for nongun robbery.66 Given
resource limitations it is understandable that judges and prosecutors
ignore mandatory gun penalty laws in order to give longer sentences to
more dangerous felons. But doing so deprives gun possession (or misuse) bans of their point, which is to disarm felons before they misuse
guns. That does not work when real punishment comes only if they are
caught in the very crimes the gun law was supposed to be preventing.
Strategies for Gun Law Enforcement
Pro- and anti-gun advocates have suggested differing, but not incompatible, strategies to effectuate gun controls. The program Project Exile
involves highly publicized, concentrated federal prosecution of felons
found with guns. It is claimed to have dramatically reduced illegal gun
carrying when tried experimentally in Richmond, Virginia.67 Strongly
endorsed by the NRA, it is the Bush administration’s primary approach
to gun issues in contradistinction to the Clinton approach, which was to
enact drastic laws but virtually never prosecute violators.
Project Exile’s value might be maximized by combining it with what
is called the Kansas City Program (so-named for where it was ‹rst tried).
This program involves the concentrated targeting of violations of public
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disorder and other minor laws rather than the disregard of such violations. This should not be confused with the “Broken Windows” theory,
which claims that enforcement of public disorder laws reverses visible
deterioration of neighborhoods that causes criminals to view them as
ripe for more serious crimes. The Kansas City Program uses the
enforcement of laws against littering, loitering, jaywalking, and so forth,
as an excuse for police to stop, arrest, and search violators.68 Such a program of systematic searches may substantially deter criminals from routinely carrying guns.
Yet the limitations and costs of such still experimental programs must
also be understood. The main limitation is that they deter only habitual
gun carrying. This should reduce “crimes of opportunity” that were not
preplanned but occurred because a felon had a gun available when a
crime opportunity arose. But such programs will not affect gun carrying
for preplanned violent felonies like robbery of a store or bank or contract
killings. The chance of being caught with the gun is minimal when the
perpetrator carries it only to and from such a preplanned crime rather
than loitering on the streets waiting for an opportunity to misuse it.
Either program will also not work without (a) routinizing the creation
of excuses to search and (b) imposing serious penalties upon illegal gun
carriers and felons in possession. This means seriously increased costs
for prosecution and imprisonment. If those costs are not fully funded, the
result will be less capacity for long-term imprisonment of those guilty of
much more serious crimes.
A second cost is in civil liberties. Using minor crime as an excuse for
search is a strategy of pretextual evasion of the Fourth Amendment.
Moreover, it raises much the same specter of discriminatory enforcement
as does racial pro‹ling. Police will not be cruising low-crime neighborhoods looking for excuses to stop, search, and arrest jaywalking white
housewives. The burden of pretextual searches will fall only on the disadvantaged and minority populations in high crime areas.
The question perhaps is not so much whether some types of gun crime
can be substantially reduced by such initiatives as whether the reduction
is worth the costs. Many would ‹nd the civil liberties costs unacceptable.
Others might deem the ‹nancial costs unacceptable. Among other things
the inevitable effect will be reduced resource availability for other criminal justice priorities and for social programs that may offer a chance to
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alleviate the root causes of crime. It cannot be predicted whether Project
Exile or the Kansas City Program will spread widely or be just two more
brie›y ballyhooed programs that are eventually dropped.
In closing I want to suggest three policy changes that could help disarm gun criminals, though not without appropriation of additional
enforcement resources. The ‹rst change would be to reverse the policy
by which federal gun laws are virtually never enforced. For instance, the
Clinton administration claimed that the Brady Act background check
stopped hundreds of thousands of convicted felons from buying guns.
Yet there were less than ‹fteen prosecutions of such felons. Over 99.99
percent were never charged with violating federal law by trying to buy
guns—and thereby left free to go out and buy guns on the street. Is it any
wonder “statistical analysis [has] provided ‘no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates’ ”?69
Consider another question that is no less real for being rhetorical:
Unless he spends his leisure hours reading the U.S. Code, how would the
adult who sold a gun to the juveniles who used it in the Columbine
school massacre know the sale violated federal law? Ordinary people
learn the laws primarily from the publicity attendant to prosecutions
under them. If, like many federal gun laws, violation is never prosecuted, how are people to know they are violating a law?
My second proposal would severely reduce the rights of violent felons
against search and seizure. Under current state laws, crimes like robbery
are theoretically subject to a prison term on the order of eight years; if a
gun was used it might provide an “enhancement” of another two.
Because a robber faced with such sentencing will demand a time-consuming trial by jury, there is likely to be a plea bargain by which the
actual sentence is perhaps only four years for the robbery and another
year for using a gun. With time off for good behavior, the robber is
paroled in twenty-four months. A condition of parole is that he waive his
rights against search for the duration of the parole, which will be only a
few years. But parole boards could instead condition parole for those
convicted of violent gun felonies on a lifetime waiver of their rights
against search. Such felons would be deterred from having guns, knowing they are forever subject to police search at any time or place for any
reason or none.
(A reviewer of this chapter doubts the constitutionality of this waiver
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scheme. But I think courts would uphold it, reasoning that the felon is
only being given a choice: if he does not want to waive his rights he can
just do his full sentence without parole. Three and one-third years—his
term less “good time”—is surely not cruel and unusual punishment for
gun robbery.)70
My last policy change would additionally incarcerate tens of thousands of violent gun criminals with only minor expenditure of scarce
prosecutorial resources (though it would require extension of federal
prison resources). Over the past twenty years many criminals have had
state convictions for robbery, rape, or burglary with an enhancement for
using a gun. Using these state convictions it is easily possible to add federal prison time to their state sentences by a systematic campaign to
reconvict them under the federal law against felons having guns. Federal
prosecutors in such a campaign will not need to plea-bargain with these
felons. Of course, the felons will demand jury trials, but the issues to be
tried will be extremely simple and straightforward, not requiring the
calling of even one witness. All that the prosecutors need to present to
prove their cases are two documents: (1) the defendant’s record of conviction of some kind of felony and (2) the defendant’s subsequent conviction of a felony involving the use of a gun. After being convicted on
this simple evidence, tens of thousands of violent gun criminals will
serve out their state sentences and then, instead of being released, go to
federal prisons to serve out their additional federal sentences. By the
time they ‹nally emerge from prison, many or most will be in their midthirties or older. At that age most violent criminals realize crime is not a
viable option.
Conclusion
A half-century of criminological research establishes that
• access to guns does not move ordinary people to commit violence;
• disarming them promotes violence by eliminating the most effective—for most people the only effective—means of self-defense;
• laws against gun possession by violent or mentally disturbed people
are useful if for no other reason than that they allow incarceration of
violators who are caught;
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• such laws, rigorously enforced, might substantially reduce gun
crime, but that requires ‹nancial investments the political system
seems unwilling to make.
The premier authority in the ‹eld has emphasized the primacy of basic
socioeconomic and cultural factors and the uselessness—indeed counterproductiveness—of focusing simplistically on the mere availability of
some particular weaponry.
Fixating on guns seems to be, for many people, a fetish which
allows them to ignore the more intransigent causes of American
violence, including its dying cities, inequality, deteriorating family
structure, and the all-pervasive economic and social consequences
of a history of slavery and racism. And just as gun control serves
this purpose for liberals, equally useless “get tough” proposals, like
longer prison terms, mandatory sentencing, and more use of the
death penalty serve the purpose for conservatives. All parties to the
crime debate would do well to give more concentrated attention to
more dif‹cult, but far more relevant, issues like how to generate
more good-paying jobs for the underclass which is at the heart of
the violence problem.71
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APPENDIX: TABLES
TABLE 1.
Russia
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Belarus
Hungary
Ukraine
Slovenia
Finland
Denmark
Croatia
Austria
Bulgaria
France
Switzerland
Belgium
United States
Poland
Germany
Romania
Sweden
Norway
Holland
Italy
Portugal
Spain
Greece
Intentional Deaths: U.S. vs. Continental Europe Ratesa
Suicide
Murder
41.2*
40.1*
40.7*
45.6*
27.9*
32.9*
22.5*
28.4*
27.2*
22.3*
22.8*
22.2*
17.3*
20.8*
21.4*
18.7*
11.6
14.2*
15.8*
12.3*
15.3*
12.3*
9.8
8.2
8.2
8.1
3.3
30.6+
22.2+
18.2+
11.7+
10.4+
3.5
11.3+
2.4
2.9
4.9
3.3
1.0
5.1
1.1
1.1b
1.7
7.8
2.8
1.1
4.1
1.0
0.8
1.2
1.7
1.7
0.9
1.3
Combined Rates
71.8
62.3
58.9
57.3
38.3
36.4
33.8
30.4
30.1
27.2
26.1
23.2
22.4
21.9
24.1
20.4
19.4
17.0
16.9
16.4
16.3
13.1
11.0
9.9
9.9
9.0
4.6
Note: In order of highest combined rate; nations having rates higher than the United
States are indicated by asterisk (suicide rate) or + sign (murder rate). These data should
be considered in light of tables 2 and 3 and the explanatory note that precedes table 3.
aBased in general on U.N. Demographic Yearbook (1998) as reported in David C.
Stolinsky, “America: The Most Violent Nation?” Medical Sentinel 5, no. 6 (2000):
199–201. It should be understood that, though the 1998 Yearbook gives figures for as late
as 1996, the figures are not necessarily for that year. The Yearbook contains the latest figure each nation has provided the U.N., which may be from 1996, 1995, or 1994.
bThe Swiss homicide figure Stolinsky reports is an error because it combines attempts
with actual murders. I have computed the Swiss murder rate by averaging the 1994 and
1995 Swiss National Police figures for actual murders in those years. These are given in
R. A. I. Munday and J. A. Stevenson, Guns and Violence: The Debate before Lord Cullen
(Essex, England: Piedmont, 1996), 268.
81
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TABLE 2.
Belgium
France
W. Germany
Holland
Italy
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
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European Gun/Handgun Violent Deathsa
Suicide
with Gun
Murder
with Handgun
% Households
with Guns
% Households
with Handguns
18.7
20.8
15.8
9.8
8.2
12.3
15.3
20.8
1.7
1.1
1.1
1.2
1.7
0.8
1.3
1.1c
16.6
22.6
8.9
1.9
16.0
32
15.1
27.2
6.8
5.5
6.7b
1.2
5.5
3.8
1.5
12.2
Note: The data in table 2 should be considered in light of tables 1 and 3 and the explanatory note
that precedes table 3.
aAs set out in table 1, note a, these data are from the U.N. Demographic Yearbook reported by
Stolinsky. The data on household gun ownership are from the British Home Office as printed in
R. A. I. Munday and J. A. Stevenson, Guns and Violence: The Debate before Lord Cullen (Essex, England: Piedmont, 1996), 30, 275.
bNote that the data here are for West Germany and were obtained when that nation still existed
as an independent entity. See table 3 for later (but differently derived) data for the current nation of
Germany.
cAgain, the Swiss homicide figure Stolinsky reports is an error because it combines attempts with
actual murders. See note b for table 1.
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Explanatory Note to Table 3: It bears emphasis that the following data
come from a special UN report whose data are not fully comparable to
those in tables 1 and 2 because they cover different years and derive from
substantially differing sources. This special report is based on data
obtained from the governments of the nations set out in table 3, especially data on gun permits or other official indicia of gun ownership in
those nations. The data on suicide and murder in those nations also come
from their governments, as do the similar data in tables 1 and 2, but for
later years, and also include data on the number of firearm homicides and
firearm suicides, which are not available from the UN source used in
tables 1 and 2.
TABLE 3.
European Firearms: Violent Deathsa
Suicide With Gun
Austria
Belarus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Finland
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Moldova
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Spain
Sweden
aThe
27.26
9.88
39.99
27.28
15.80
3.54
33.34
1.01
3.63
5.78
1.23
1.30
0.88
14.23
0.16
13.24
5.92
15.65
0.58
1.95
Murder With Gun
2.14
9.86
2.80
22.11
3.25
1.81
1.33
4.07
17.06
2.61
4.32
2.38
1.58
1.35
0.53
0.92
6.2
0.87
0.21
0.55
0.47
0.63
0.27
0.12
0.36
0.19
0.31
Number of Guns
per 100,000 Population
41.02b
16.5
27.58
28.56
411.20
122.56
77.00
15.54
6.61
5.30
2.97
31.91
64.69
246.65
data in this table derive from a survey (much more exhaustive than those referenced in
tables 1 and 2) of legal firearms ownership in numerous nations that was carried out by researchers
provided by the government of Canada under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and
Social Council, Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 1997. The entire survey
was published as a report to the secretary- general on April 25, 1997, as E/CN.15/1997/4. That
report is analyzed in some detail in an unpublished paper (“A Cross Sectional Study of the Relationship between Levels of Gun Ownership and Violent Deaths”) written by the leading English
student of firearms regulation, retired chief superintendent of English police Colin Greenwood of
the Firearms Research and Advisory Service. We are indebted to Chief Superintendent Greenwood
for the opportunity to review his paper.
bThe firearms ownership figure for Austria may be an undercount because an Austrian license is
not limited to a single firearm but rather allows the licensee to possess multiple guns.